Foolproof recipes and expert advice for making cake and yeast doughnuts, plus techniques for safe, easy deep-frying, glaze and topping ideas, and a guide to ingredients and toolsby Lara Ferroni

Making Cake Doughnuts

Cake doughnuts, also known as old-fashioned doughnuts, are leavened with baking powder or baking soda and have a fluffy crumb and a lightly crisp crust. They're made from a thick batter that comes together quickly (no mixer required), and the doughnuts only need a short rest period before they can be fried or baked.

Deep-Frying Cake Doughnuts

Doughnut shops typically fry cake doughnuts and use special doughnut droppers that extrude the batter directly into the hot oil. To mimic this action at home, use a pastry bag to pipe circles of batter onto parchment paper squares, then use the parchment to carefully flip the doughnuts into the hot oil, gently pulling the parchment off the top. Once they're in the hot oil, cake doughnuts will submerge for a few seconds before floating to the surface. Fry them for one to two minutes until the submerged half is golden brown. As the bottom fries, some splitting may occur along the top, but this is nothing to worry about. Once you see the golden brown color along the center of the doughnut, where it hits the oil, gently flip it over with a large slotted spoonor a chopstickand continue frying for another one to two minutes until evenly golden brown all over.

Baking Cake Doughnuts

Prefer not to deep-fry? Cake doughnuts are ideal for baking, as long as you follow a recipe specifically designed for the oven. There are baked and fried versions of both cake and yeast doughnuts, but sticking to your recipe's cooking method is important. In other words, avoid frying a baked doughnut recipe and avoid baking a fried doughnut recipe.

Baked cake doughnut recipes tend to have slightly more oil in them to create a rich pastry, but since they're not fried, there's no messy oil cleanup at the end. It's possible to bake cake doughnuts in a mini-muffin pan, but they will be flat on the bottom rather than rounded like a classic doughnut-shop doughnut. To achieve the iconic doughnut shape, you will need to use a special doughnut pan, with rounded wells.

Adding Mix-Ins

Cake doughnuts are more dense than their yeast-risen siblings, so they benefit from a central hole and aren't ideal for filling. But whether baked or fried, cake doughnuts work great with mix-ins! Try using finely chopped nuts, dried fruits, fresh berries (drained of any excess juices), or mini chocolate chips, or raid your spice cabinet. Whatever you choose to add, just stir it in before you let the batter rest.

Cake Doughnut Do-Ahead Advice

You can get a jump start on doughnut making by freezing the uncooked batter. Prepare the batter and pipe rings onto parchment paper squares, arranged in a single layer, on a baking sheet. Freeze the rings until solid and then wrap each frozen doughnut (on its parchment square) in a double layer of plastic wrap, or place a bunch of doughnuts in a plastic freezer bag. Let frozen doughnuts come to room temperature before frying or baking.